Sites about Timon of Athens

Critical sites about Timon of Athens

'I wish to explore the particular force of this fantasy by placing the play in a triangular relationship with James I's misogynistic figuration of women and with the popular genre of abuse pamphlets--pamphlets that mark a desire to affirm male phallic authority by verbally abusing women. While each element of this triangle projects distinct fantasies of male autonomy, all three share an active desire to contain the apparent threat to male autonomy posed by phallic women, and all three do so by denying women any constructive role in their culture. As Wheeler and Kahn have noted, this shared impulse gestures to a primal desire to repress the mother's crucial role as a powerful agent in the birth of the male self. Quite possibly it yields, as welt, a desire to rewrite the early modern cultural ideal of aristocratic patriarchy. For if this patriarchal structure depends, in part, on the mediatory role of women, the texts I examine share a fantasy of absolute male autonomy which depends on the vilification or repression of women."

Contains: Character Analysis

Author: Maria Teresa Michaela Prendergast

From:Criticism Spring 2000

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